Pre-amble

The adoption adventures began in August 2008. My husband and I thought that we might be ready to start a family. Not being one who does anything "normal", we decided to adopt. Well, truthfully, the choice to adopt was made a year prior to this. You see, I was on vacation in Hawaii and decided to get a tattoo to remember the trip. It was my first tattoo and it took 4 hours. It was the most painful experience of my life. I had been in the sun for 4 days prior and was quite burnt. I was so bruised after the tattoo that you almost couldn't see what the tattoo was (Hibiscus flowers with very vibrant colors) through the black hue. I actually had to tell the tattoo artist that I couldn't do any more at the 4 hour mark. He wanted to an additional 2 hours of color! It was that day that I decided to adopt because I was not going to put my body through anything that painful EVER again; including child birth. So, the decision was made.

After mounds of paperwork, adoption classes, and 4 interviews, we were approved! A few short weeks later we got a phone call letting us know that we had been unofficially matched with 9 kids/sibling groups. Because they don't want to make it seem like you are shopping for kids, they present one at a time to you with only VERY limited information. Based on that you have to decide if you want to be made an official match with that child to start the information sharing process. The unofficial matches are made similarly to an on-line dating service. You enter in your criteria for kids, number of kids, age, gender, disabilities, etc. and they find matches based on that. The first 2 kids we heard about we said no to because of their types of disabilities which we were not willing to deal with. Our 3rd match ended up sounding really great. We decided to be made an official match and start the information sharing portion of the adoption. Now, at this point we have not met the boy, we haven't even seen a picture of him. They want you to fall in love with the kid on paper before you meet him. During this whole process and even into the pre-placement visits we have the opportunity to change our minds if we feel that it is not working out. This is somewhat comforting, however you can also imagine how horrible it would be for a child to meet his new parents only to have them reject him. So, they want you to be pretty positive that you want to go ahead with the adoption.

A few weeks after we were officially matched with our 8 year old boy, we did the information sharing. Two days packed full of meetings with this years' teacher, last years' teacher, his doctor, his social worker, his foster parents and their worker; pretty much everyone that is involved with this little boy. We heard some amazing and wonderful things about this little guy and really, not too much negative. We were really excited and happy about everything that we heard. That weekend we drove home and told our parents about the son we decided to adopt. They were thrilled to be adding another grandson to the mix.